


Their Own Problems

by AdelphaHighbrow



Category: Anne with an E (TV)
Genre: F/M, Masturbation, Shameless Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-19 20:01:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15517512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdelphaHighbrow/pseuds/AdelphaHighbrow
Summary: Gilbert struggles to live peacefully in a house with newlyweds.





	Their Own Problems

_“Do boys have to contend with anything like this?”_  
  
_“They have their own problems.”_

            Gilbert Blythe blamed the long hours. Waking up before the sun rose every morning to do his chores before meeting Ms. Stacy, competing for top rank in his class, working alongside Bash on the farm of an evening, and his apprenticeship with Dr. Ward had left him exhausted when it finally came time to rest. It was his exhaustion he blamed when his mind slipped its leash of carefully bred decency into ignoble terrain. In his defense, it wasn’t easy to ignore the sounds of newlyweds in the dark of an otherwise quiet house. He didn’t blame Bash and Mary, either, as bitterly as he regarded the unwanted score of their lovemaking some nights. It wasn’t their fault that he had seemed to develop into an apparent lecher.

            Appreciation of the female form had begun early for him. He never went through a period of repulsion for girls the way many of his peers had but neither had his admiration ever ventured into the unwholesome. Girls were lovely. A mysterious feminine “other” whose delicacy was missing in the life of a motherless child. Being his father’s son, he had always been a flirt, unconsciously angling for feminine attention and approval for which he’d never had a maternal source. At most, an innocent curiousity. Was their skin especially soft? What did they think about? When he was about thirteen he had begun to experience physical changes that seemed to be linked to speculations of kissing and what breasts might feel like. He interrupted and managed those thoughts fairly quickly, recognizing them as unworthy. Like his father, he was a gentleman to his bones. Well… _was._ Increasingly for the past two years Gilbert had been trying to remember the few feeble lessons his father had taught him about this sort of thing. It probably began with his days on the docks.

            In his determination to make his own way in the world, he had begun working at the docks in Charlottetown almost two years ago and on the S. S. Primrose soon after. He fully anticipated that this honest labor would abet his passage into manhood but whatever expectation he had about being subjected to the lewd speech of his blue collar cohorts could not have prepared him for the reality. His usual blithe confidence faltered briefly by his third day at the docks. One of the men unloading cargo with him had emphatically teased another using coarse vocabulary to describe both male and female anatomy. By the time he was a stoker on the Primrose his worldly knowledge had, to his chagrin, increased ten fold. He didn’t know which was worse, listening to the men on nearby hammocks masturbate or listening to them brag about their exploits. It was foul. There was no other word for it. The way those men viewed women, and what’s worse, _used_ women if their stories were to be believed, disgusted him. They were probably to blame for putting ideas in his head.

            Though thankful that Bash, while more tolerant, wasn’t like others, Gilbert still wished his father were around to talk to. As humiliating as it was, he knew there would be a way to ask him what men were supposed to do when they were too young for marriage but old enough that these types of thoughts were stubbornly persistent. He resented the message society seemed to send him that all men were beasts and yet all men were harbingers of civilization. He resented being defined as a beast. He wanted to be a man of science and reason. He wanted this part of his adulthood to be regulated to its proper time and place and not rule him. Was it true that this was a problem that would dim with age? He didn’t blame the seamen, or the Lacroixs, or the sweet, unwitting fixure of his carnal fasciation. He only blamed himself…

            These thoughts plagued him as he lay awake staring at his ceiling in the lamp light. Just as he thought he might be able to sleep the amorous clamor from “the honeymoon suite” downstairs began again. It made it so difficult to look Mary in the eye every morning. After the first few nights he began to disconnect his two friends with the noises they made. After the first ten or fifteen minutes it was no longer Bash and Mary making those sounds. It was just a man and a woman. No one specific, just an archetypal Man and Woman. That’s when it became bearable for him to listen… and then it became something better than bearable. This was about the moment of the evening that the high pitched panting noises morphed from Archetypal Woman’s in his imagination to those of _Anne._ He sighed. Now he was hard.

            All the self reproach, the scolding, the determination not to pollute the image of his adorable friend became as feeble an effort as holding water in the cup of one’s hand. He closed his eyes and listened, imagining how different her voice might sound if it was her pleasure being grinded into-

_What was wrong with him?!_

            But he knew.  There was no use denying he felt more than friendship for the lively redhead. He hadn’t been able to escape her even when he was abroad. Thoughts of her had come unbidden since the moment they met. There was no denying that she had excited him from the first. Even then she was wholly beautiful to look at. In those early days, thoughts of innocent kisses and embraces with her thrilled him. But _this_? She would be sixteen in March. She had been transfigured from an adorable girl to whom the boy in him was helplessly drawn into a shapely young lady. Her figure was lithe and her gait elegant. Mostly she had abandoned her trademark braids for a style that let most of her hair hang loose with only some of it pulled back. The first time she came to class like that his breath hitched and he had stared at her that day more than usual. The rich, vibrant color had made his heart beat faster every time it caught his glance. The closer she got the worse it became. Now most days he could see it hang freely like a gossamer curtain against her long, ivory neck. When he thought of curling it around his fingers to allow his mouth access to the freckles there… a long, low moan emanated from downstairs and he reached his hand beneath his waistband.

            Amongst the books Dr. Ward had lent him to aid his study of medicine was _Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical_ by Henry Gray. His curiosity had been purely academic when he began the chapter on _Female_ _Organs of Generation_. He read it with the intent on increasing his knowledge of obstetrics. It was the first time he had been confronted with the forbidden knowledge of exactly what lay beneath a lady’s skirts. And the first time he had read the word “clitoris”. It was only later did this new found knowledge (entrusted to him due to his sacred pursuit, he thought with shame) wind its way into the part of his mind that thirsted for its wicked applications. He’d studied her perfect face. Her eyebrows were red, her eyelashes. It wasn’t much of a leap to deduce that her hair would be red below as well. Yes, how _wonderful_.

            He could envision her now at the foot of his bed in her under things. Did she wear a corset? How could girls tell? She was so slender. His breath hitched again at the thought of her in a white chemise. He could see her shyly sliding it off her shoulders. Her bare shoulders, dotted in freckles that were for his eyes alone. Anne was vivacious but _never_ a flirt. That was one of the things that enflamed him about her the most. He loved seeing her bright blue eyes flash in outrage (even when it was directed at him). He loved seeing them light up when she was delighted, as she so often was when she was learning or weaving stories. But when he complimented her or smiled at her she was suddenly so bashful. Her blushes were treasures he kept and counted. It gave him a fluttering hope that maybe he had an effect on her. He could see her now, shy before him, but wanting him the way he wanted her. Now he was picturing her quickly abandoning her embarrassment as he worshipped her body with his own. She would be the fiery Anne-girl that she was in every other aspect of her life.

_“You have a redhead back home, Blythe?”_

_He groaned in irritation. “No! Just a friend. Bash is an idiot.”_

_“Haha! Maybe you’re not so pure after all, Blythe! Them redheads is fire in the sheets.”_

_Gilbert’s eyes widened and be blushed furiously. He would never forgive Bash for opening the door to this from the other stokers._

_“Oh, yeah!” Another man began swiveling his hips forward and backward lewdly. “A ginger will make a man out of you, make no mistake. I can testify to that!”_

_“Look, she’s just a friend and she’s really young ,so-“_

_“Let me ask you this: Does she got a temper?”_

_Gilbert didn’t want to answer any more questions but the man seemed to take his silence for one anyway._

_“Yep! That’s what I thought! Watch out, Blythe! I’ve tasted them all, every color and creed. And_ nothing _beats a redhead for a wild fuck.”_

_“That’s right,” the other laughed. “It’s a good thing you’re so young. She’ll have you in every hole she’s got, like she’s starving for it, before you can even take your hat off.”_

_Gilbert had heard enough. He didn’t really want to get into a brawl with two grown men that he had to continue to work in close quarters with so with clenched fists he marched out of the mess hall, having lost his appetite. But not before he could hear them laughing and calling out,_

_“The trick is, you got to get ‘em good and mad at you first. That makes them so wet-“_

            He had been furious and revolted when that had occurred. They had teased him about Anne for the next two weeks until Bash had presumably gotten them to stop. But now he had only to be disgusted with himself as he let his imagination explore every avenue of what the men had said. He gripped himself tighter, thinking to how angry she could get. He knew that passion would spill over into his bed. Maybe she would punish him for all the times he teased her. Maybe she knew the effect she had on him and would use it against him like a weapon, riding him from on top as he lay beneath, unraveling with every rise and fall. She was so slim, her small breasts the perfect size for his hands. She would be very tight. She would be- she would… He was speeding up as the panting downstairs was getting louder and faster. In his mind it was Anne, so caught up in punishing him that she had become victim to her own pleasure. He was thrusting his hips hard now. Her eyes would be half closed, her precious brow knit in ecstacy. Her teeth would be visible beneath her upper lip as the bottom one parted, so plump and pink. Her neck would arch back as he gripped her thighs, one hand slowly making its way to her pert bottom. There would be freckles on her thighs, too, he imagined. They would be so creamy white beneath his fingers. He wouldn’t allow this blissful, coiling feeling to unfurl until he was sure she had first. That was the competition between them. She would abandon all hope of finishing him first as he drove into her sweet, warm depths, driving her closer to the brink. That’s when he’d start gently making circles around her left nipple when- when…

_“Uh, Gil- Oh, Gil- Gil- Uh-U-u-uhhhhhn!” His Anne screamed._

            The noises were finished. Gilbert laid with his eyes squeezed shut as he spilled into his hand and bed clothes. After a long moment he slowed to a stop and waited for his breathing to return to normal. With his heart still thumping loudly and a feeling of peaceful satisfaction he began the work of cleaning himself up. He should probably hate himself. Just now he was still in the aftershocks of the most wonderful fantasy of Anne Shirley-Cuthbert returning his adoration and the hope that it might be a reality one day kept him from the worst of the shame. When he laid back down he dimmed his lamp and sighed in resignation. It wasn’t long before sleep arrested him and he no longer had to wrestle his guilt. He would begin the process of penitence the next day as he worked towards a future that might be worthy of its goddess.


End file.
